Home > Publications > IASL: School Libraries Worldwide - January-July 2004

SCHOOL LIBRARIES WORLDWIDE

Volume 10, Numbers 1 and 2, January-July 2004

Editorial: The Synergy of Making Connections
Dianne Oberg and Julie Tallman

Reading and Use of Informational Material by South African Youth
Myrna P. Machet
Research on children's reading habits, preferences and information use provides useful insights for those working to motivate children and young people to read and use information. This study, conducted by The Children's Literature Research Unit (CLRU) in the Department of Information Science at the University of South Africa (Unisa), Pretoria, was modelled on a study of children’s reading habits in England conducted by the Roehampton Institute in the 1990s. Findings reported in this article are related to the reading of informational material by children in South Africa between the ages of nine to 16 years of age. Although many learners in South Africa have limited access to school libraries or public libraries, the study participants had a positive attitude to reading and non-fiction texts. They were developing strategies to deal with information texts by using retrieval tools and they prepared to persevere with books even if there were words they did not understand. The study showed that what children are interested in reading in South Africa is not radically different from children in England. However, because many young people in South Africa are reading in a second language, information books need to be written with this in mind.

Constructing Knowledge About and With Informational Texts: Implications for Teacher-Librarians working with Young Children
Margot Filipenko
Although young children's developing understandings of the concept of story have been thoroughly researched, children's information literacy development has gone largely unexamined. This article reports a study of young children’s understandings of informational texts and offers a grounded theory of these children's information literacy development. Six broad conceptual categories of children’s talk emerged from the data analysis: informational text knowledge; world knowledge; representing meaning; building connections; reflective talk, and relational talk. These categories represented the various facets of children’s engagement with non-fiction texts and revealed the ways in which these children constructed meaning about and with this type of text. The findings from this study have implications for early childhood education and impact on the teaching of information literacy and the role of the teacher-librarian.

Theme Section: Gender and Digital Technologies

Gender, Technologies, and the School Library
Theme Editor: Denise E. Agosto

Gender, ICT-Related Student Skills and the Role of a School Library in an Icelandic School
Sólveig Jakobsdóttir, Bára Mjöll Jónsdóttir, and Torfi Hjartarson
This article focuses on gender and age differences in information and communications (ICT) skills, attitudes and computer use in an Icelandic school 1998 (62 students) and 2002 (63 students). Computer culture is described with attention to the school library media center. ICT skills of students went up from 1998 to 2002 for the primary level group, particularly the girls. Computer use at the primary level tended to go up whereas the opposite was true for older grades. Computer classes and improved Internet access may have enhanced ICT skills among students although computer access and activity in regular classes have lessened.

Gender and Control of Dialogue in Asynchronous Forums: Implications for School Library Media Specialists
Rebecca K. Scheckler
This study adds to the information of online educational sites by examining the deployment of power and status in an online professional development website for pre-service and in-service math and science teachers. Initiation and continuation of threads in asynchronous discussion forums is viewed as a powerful activity and one parallel to the control of discussion in face-to-face classrooms as an issue of control. Studies of two discussion forums on the same topic, one comprised of mainly in-service and the other comprised of mainly pre-service teachers, showed a significant difference in the number of threads initiated by men and by women with men dominating. In addition the threads initiated by men were much more likely to receive responses that continued the discussion while the threads initiated by women were very likely to end with that one post. Other features of educational forums such as flaming did not occur here at all. I conclude that the more subtle features of power and control in online spaces are just as important as overt features in encouraging and discouraging people to engage in participation in these forums. School library media specialists as mediators and interpreters of Internet tools, and frequently female role models for technology uses, will find this paper of practical use as they work for gender equity in their own settings.

Using Internet Metasites to Foster Teenage Girls' Interest in Technology
Lesley S. J. Farmer
Around the world, girls do not have equal access to technology both physically and intellectually. School library programs are uniquely positioned to address this issue by promoting Internet sites for girls to use technology. Providing relevant and attractive web sites for girls has interested education, organizations, and business in recent years. Since thousands of Web sites target teenage girl audiences, the focus of this research was metasites or directories of public web sites that would link to sites on technology for teenage girls. These metasites and other web sites that support teenage girls' knowledge and involvement in technology are analyzed.

Last Updated 30 July 2004 (LAC)